Episcopal Problems with Documentation

Documents are appearing fast in the controversy over whether the consecration of the first four bishops of the Anglican Church in North America (see February 24 issue, page 44) was valid. The flurry of papers is coming from overseas as well as from within the ACNA and from the headquarters of the Episcopal Church, from which the ACNA broke away.

The documents raise questions not only about which bishops had the authority to consecrate the ACNA leaders but also about which bishops are telling the truth about the matter.

Time magazine’s report last month brought a sharp retort from Bishop Albert A. Chambers, retired bishop of Springfield, Illinois, who was the only American Episcopalian serving as a consecrator. Chambers issued a statement and a notarized copy of the handwritten letter that he said he received from Korean bishop Mark Pae. The letter, dated January 24 (four days before the Denver consecration rites), conveys Pae’s regrets “that I cannot come to the U.S. of America at this time” and gives “my consent to the consecration” of Dale Doren, who formerly served in Korea.

Chambers, in the statement issued last month, wrote: “The Time magazine article leaves the impression that Dr. Doren was not telling the truth when he said he had brought from Korea a letter from Bishop Mark Pae, giving his consent to the consecration of his own archdeacon, who has been his good friend for many years. Is one to conclude from the Time report that the letter read to the congregation at the consecration service was a forged document, written to fool somebody?… It is an insult to Bishop Doren to imply that he would manufacture such a letter. I have the original in my possession.… It is quite understandable to me that [Pae] now chooses to deny he wrote the letter because it is clear he has been under great pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury. But his denial has no effect on the validity of the consecration.”

Time religion writer Dick Ostling said that in his interviews with Pae both before and after the Denver ceremony Pae denied that he had given his consent. However, Ostling told Religious News Service that by reporting that the letter had been read in Denver and that Pae had denied giving his consent, “we did not mean to imply where the truth lay.”

Pae’s role is important because Doren was the first of the four ACNA bishops to be consecrated. Pae was considered (in absentia) to be one of the three bishops—the minimum acceptable number—consecrating Doren. Doren was then one of three bishops who participated in the other three consecrations. The Chambers statement said, “The canons found in the Apostolic Constitutions clearly state that, should a bishop be unable to be present to consecrate, he may send his written consent, and I am convinced that Bishop Pae did just that.”

Assisting Chambers in the consecration of Doren was Francisco J. Pagtakhan, a bishop of the Philippine Independent Catholic Church, a body that is in communion with the Episcopal Church (U.S.A.). Macario V. Ga, supreme bishop of the Philippine body, has now assured Episcopal presiding bishop John M. Allin that Pagtakhan’s participation was unauthorized. Ga sent Allin a communique from an extraordinary session of his church’s bishops in which they declare they are “severely distressed and shocked beyond belief” that one of their brother bishops took part in the Denver ceremony.

Pagtakhan, a non-diocesan bishop, issued a statement of his own last month. He told of contacts between supporters of the ACNA and his church that led to Ga’s explicitly authorizing him to participate in the consecration. Pagtakhan stated that after he was asked to take part in the Denver ceremony, the supreme bishop appointed him “secretary for local and foreign missions and internal and external ecumenical affairs” and directed him to handle several items of church business while in the United States. Although Pagtakhan said Ga did not give him a requested letter to take to the January ceremony, he quoted the supreme bishop as saying, “You can participate at the consecration.” According to Pagtakhan, the supreme bishop told him that appointment to the secretary’s post “will serve the purpose just the same” as a letter of authorization.

Pagtakhan said that before he left for the United States he asked his superior, “Suppose Bishop Chambers and his group want to have intercommunion with our church?” The reply, he said, was, “No problem, for in reality and in truth, theirs is the original church which was the [Episcopal Church] then with whom we were in intercommunion.”

Ga, the supreme bishop, sent Allin a cable about the extraordinary session of his bishops while the Episcopal Church Executive Council was meeting in New Orleans last month. Pagtakhan was visiting in California at the time and was reported to be “flabbergasted” by the news. He then fired off a cable to Bishop Manuel Lagasca, president of the Supreme Council of Bishops in the Philippine church, to ask about the action. One pro-ACNA source said Lagasca (not Ga) answered that there had been no such action by the council. Pagtakhan immediately began making plans to return to Manila to ask the council to set the record straight.

Sources in the United States are unclear about what authority Ga (the supreme bishop) and Lagasca (the president of the supreme council of bishops) have. Some contend that Ga is only a figurehead and can attend meetings of the council only upon invitation. The pro-ACNA group maintain that Lagasca has the authority to speak for the council. To back this claim, they sent out a January 20 document in which Lagasca conferred the “Bishop Aglipay Cross” on Chambers “and his sympathizers” for “putting up a continuing Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” In addition to being president of the council, Lagasca is also identified as the metropolitan bishop of Greater Manila. In the citation to Chambers he specified that he was honoring the American “in behalf of the supreme council.”

In his statement, Pagtakhan gave an involved account of how Ga, the supreme bishop, first put him in touch with a supporter of the ACNA, layman Edward Heatherman of Los Angeles. He recalled that one day the telephone rang in Ga’s office and Ga answered. “I overheard him saying that the supreme bishop was out and that he, the one answering the phone, was Mr. Fermin, the clerk,” Pagtakhan said in the statement. “I got serious and asked him why he was disguising himself as someone else. He covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and told me that on the other end of the line was a certain Mr. Heatherman sent by Bishop Chambers and his group, that Bishop Chambers had called him long distance several times, asking him to participate in the consecration of the new bishops, but he had not wanted to commit himself so that [the Episcopal Church] could not say anything against him.” At that point, Pagtakhan reported, he suggested that Ga send him to talk to the American, and Ga agreed. The conference with Heatherman resulted in the invitation to Pagtakhan to come to Denver, with all expenses paid, and Ga reportedly approved the plan.

Before Allin went to New Orleans for the meeting of the executive council, he sent a letter to all American bishops to report a telephone conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Allin said the archbishop agreed with him in the trans-Atlantic talk that the ACNA is not in communion with the worldwide Anglican communion.

No doubt more documents will appear on both sides of the consecration controversy in the months that remain before this summer’s meeting of the Lambeth Conference, Anglicanism’s global parliament.

South Africa From the Inside

Worldwide attention continues to focus on the racial and political situation in South Africa. Early this year Amnesty International issued a major report on what it called political imprisonment in that country. The World Council of Churches sent a “discussion document” to member denominations alerting them to three pieces of proposed legislation that it said would curtail church social work in South Africa. In the United States, the National Council of Churches-related Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility launched a new round of stockholder activity aimed at twenty-three companies doing business in South Africa. The exiled South African editor Donald Woods spoke at the Interchurch Center in New York. A commission from the Reformed Ecumenical Synod planned to meet with South African member churches to discuss racial matters. Meanwhile, more and more religious leaders within the country are speaking up. The following is condensed from a report on some evangelical activity by Johannesburg correspondent Gordon Jackson.

South Africa’s evangelical whites, traditionally either staunch upholders of the country’s status quo or else devoutly apolitical in their faith, are marching to a slightly different beat in 1978. More than ever they are looking at their faith in the context of their country’s socio-political crisis, and for the first time some are coming up with responses that have overt political overtones.

Like some of their counterparts in the United States, South Africa’s white evangelicals have long feared theological contamination by association with the “dreaded liberals” and have mostly avoided personal involvement in social issues. Bill Houston, general secretary of the Students’ Christian Association, pointed out the dichotomous reasoning that has prevailed: “It’s okay for the missions to be involved in social concern but not for the churches at home.” He cited especially the lack of concern about matters of vital importance to blacks.

Houston, 35, and others believe that this stance is now changing, however. The attention paid to Christian social responsibility at the Lausanne Congress in 1974 and at the Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly in Nairobi in 1976 has influenced South African evangelical leaders. The escalating racial tensions at home have also contributed to their awareness.

One manifestation of the new concern is the plan to hold a South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA) with wide representation late this year. Another is the “momentous week”—to use evangelist Michael Cassidy’s phrase—of a renewal conference last year. During the conference, whose influence was felt far beyond the charismatic circles in which it had its primary thrust, racial, linguistic, and denominational barriers broke down. Many of the nearly 2,500 delegates literally lept and wept with joy in Christian unity. One delegate said of the experience: “What we saw here was God creating a family.”

That comment applies also to the changing picture of Christians in the country as a whole. A speaker at a SACLA planning meeting late last year noted, “Black and White [Christians] have started talking to one another.” An example of this was last fall’s conference of the Interdenominational Association of African Ministers in South Africa, a black group. The conference, unlike previous ones, was pointedly multi-racial. The members took the extraordinary step of inviting David Bosch, a theology professor at the University of South Africa, to address them on the conference theme of reconciliation.

As for politics, white Christians are less hesitant than before about extending their witness to what in South Africa is a particularly sensitive area. The most dramatic example of this in recent months was the Koinonia Declaration, which shone a light on several of the government’s most morally sensitive policies (see January 27 issue, page 24). Drawn up by two groups of young Calvinists near Johannesburg, the document was published shortly before the country’s general election last November 30. It was intended as a call to the white voters to bring biblical perspectives to bear on their choices at the poll. Among its recommendations were: ease the country’s system of detention without trial; scrap the law that prohibits marriage between whites and other race groups from participating in one another’s political affairs; introduce judicial means to prevent another possible “Biko case,” a reference to the death in detention of black leader Steven Biko; and give the public fuller information on security matters, “so that we might be able properly to judge the actions of the executive powers and consequently be better able to exercise responsibly our democratic right of voting.”

Predictably, the declaration won prompt and glowering denunciations from government supporters. The Afrikaans language daily, Die Transvaler, condemned it as a move intended solely to lend support to the integrationist Progressive Federal Party.

Then, in a particularly symbolic example of Christian political action, forty-four men and women were arrested while singing Christmas carols outside the Johannesburg police headquarters last December 20. The police felt that the carol singers had contravened the Riotous Assemblies Act. They were obliged, under the letter of the law, to stop what was ostensibly a bona fide Christian gathering because the group had not received prior permission to assemble as they did.

One member of the largely Christian and student-affiliated group, which included a priest and four nuns, said: “We knew it would put them in the position of not knowing what to do.” Some Christians, sympathetic to the group’s objectives, nonetheless disapproved of the ill-disguised confrontation.

Although Afrikaans-speaking whites have traditionally been reluctant to criticize their government on any grounds, this has been changing in recent years. Still, the government continues to expect a high degree of solidarity from them. The fact that a small number of students and faculty at Potchefstroom University, a long-standing bastion of Afrikaaner conservatism, were involved in the Koinonia Declaration was a source of particular embarrassment to the government.

Speaking about the church’s social responsibilities, Bosch says: “Race relations are the priority for Christians. Issues like pornography and alcohol, important though they are, are non-issues by comparison.”

Mounting evidence suggests that a small but growing number of white evangelicals from all parts of the political spectrum agree with him, to the extent that they are no longer willing to leave politics just to the politicians.

Chief and Church

Transkei is the first of the tribal black “homelands” to attain self-government under South African law. Since its creation in 1976 it has not been recognized by other nations, and the World Council of Churches is one of the groups leading opposition to its recognition. Opponents of the South African policy of establishing the Bantu homelands describe it as a way of disenfranchising South African blacks and further segregating them.

Some churchmen within the Transkei have been less than enthusiastic about the country’s “independence,” and the prime minister of the Transkei reacted early this year. Kaiser Matanzima, himself a Methodist lay preacher, said he will ban the Methodist Church of South Africa from his country. He alleged that the denomination was taking its orders from the WCC. His cabinet will support an act of parliament to establish a Methodist Church of Transkei.

Criticism of Matanzima’s announcement came from all sides. Colin Morris, general secretary of the British Methodist Church’s overseas division, called it a “comic opera development” and added. “It is highly appropriate that a phoney state like Transkei should try to establish a phoney church.” The acting secretary of the South Africa Council of Churches, Methodist John Rees, rejected Matanzima’s reasons for banning the church.

There was general support for the move, however, from a commentator on the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation. The commentator said that even though “banning of a Christian church in any country is deplorable,” there is a question in this case whether the church “has not brought the action upon itself.”

After the initial flap over the Transkei announcement, Matanzima agreed to meet a group of Methodist leaders to talk it over.

Bophuthatswana, the second of the homelands to be granted self-government, came into being last December. As another of the Bantu states with strong dependence on the South African government it is also under a cloud internationally. The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board announced in the United States, however, that it was opening work in Bophuthatswana. A couple forced to leave Ethiopia by the civil strife there has begun missionary activity in the new tribal state.

Rhodesian Church: Opening to All

As leaders of factions vying for power in Rhodesia continue to try to reach terms for a transition to majority government, churches continue to be in the spotlight. All the principals in the top-level negotiations have strong church identifications. Meanwhile; amidst the tense situation, more and more reports of revival are coming from the African nation. A pastor from one of Rhodesia’s charismatic congregations was recently interviewed by correspondent Ruthanne Garlock in Dallas, Texas. Her report follows.

Who holds the answer to the riddle of Rhodesia? The problem is so complex it seems to defy solution. But at least one citizen of that troubled land feels he has a handle on it.

“The answer to Rhodesia is not a political answer; the answer is Christ,” says 47-year-old Don Normand, pastor of Mabelreign Chapel in the largest suburb of Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital.

And how has the church been affected by the guerrilla warfare raging there over the past five years? “The evangelical church is suffering through tribulation, but it is growing spiritually,” Normand says. “More people than ever before are turning from conventional Christianity to being born again, amongst both black and white. Even some terrorists are coming to know Christ as Saviour.”

At Mabelreign Chapel, begun ten years ago as a breakaway Assemblies of God church for whites, blacks are welcome at all meetings. “We have open worship,” Normand reports. “If an African wants to pray in his mother tongue, he is welcome to do so, but the meeting is conducted in English. We get a lot of African university students.”

Normand, a South African of German descent, had an engineering background when he entered the ministry, and he directed construction of the chapel. One day during morning tea break he tried to witness to a black man working on the construction crew. Normand felt the man was totally unresponsive. That same afternoon a huge beam toppled, striking the black worker across the chest.

“I had him in my arms to carry him out to the Land Rover,” Normand recalled. “Every bone in his chest was crushed. He looked at me and said, ‘Bwana, I’m going to be with Jesus.’ Tears came to his eyes, and he died in my arms. When the church was finished I put a plaque under the cross in remembrance of Patrick Matika.”

During its first two years, only about thirty white people attended Mabelreign Chapel. Various black congregations asked to use the chapel on Sunday afternoons, but two white board members refused. Finally Normand overruled the board and welcomed Pastor Elijah Guti to conduct meetings on Sunday afternoons. The dissenting board members left.

“From that moment on, the church began to grow,” Normand says. “The blood of a black man is in the foundation of that church, and blacks will always be welcome there.” Currently the building is in use almost every night of the week and three times on Sunday. Half the meetings are conducted in English and half in the Shona language. All are open to both blacks and whites.

Mabelreign’s white congregation fluctuates drastically because whites are fleeing Rhodesia at the rate of a thousand a month. Since last November, when attendance was running five hundred or more, a hundred parishioners have left. But the ranks are swelled with new converts and with transfers from mainline congregations, particularly Methodist. Normand reports that many people are leaving these churches out of protest over the World Council of Churches’ political involvement in the war and its funding of guerrilla groups. Two other charismatic churches in Salisbury are seeing the same type of growth.

The people of Rhodesia live with the tragedies of war every day, but according to Normand the strife has brought a greater awareness of eternal things and greater opportunities to witness. Prime Minister Ian Smith’s son, Alec, was converted after being involved in drugs, and now attends Mabelreign Chapel regularly, Normand said. Many soldiers are being converted while on duty.

In the evangelical churches, believers gather for prayer every morning at five o’clock. Most of them are women praying for their husbands and sons in military service out in the bush.

From the time he finishes school until he is 35, a Rhodesian man must serve intermittently in the army, spending seven weeks in the bush, then five weeks at home. From 35 to 50 he must serve ten days a month. Many families are leaving the country to protect their sons from military service.

Normand and his wife, Cynthia, who have three daughters and a son about to graduate from university, have considered leaving but now feel they should remain as long as possible. In Normand’s opinion, 85 per cent of both the white and the black population is content to follow Smith’s leadership of a pluralistic society in Rhodesia. He says it is the 15 per cent minority, supported by Communist agitators, that keeps the warfare alive.

“I’m not just for the preservation of white skin in Africa; we’re all going to lose our skin one day,” he observes. “I’m concerned that the black man is maintained in the gospel of Jesus Christ and has the fair opportunity to be raised in a civilized culture.”

News Goliaths, Watch Out?

“Watch out, CBS, NBC, and ABC. You’re in for some stiff competition in the television news field.”

That is the tone of an announcement issued by the Christian Broadcasting Network’s M. G. “Pat” Robertson, but the big three can wait a few months before relinquishing their ratings. Although September is the target date for the start of the CBN newscasts, a spokesman said that October may be more likely. As of late last month, only one journalist had been named to staff CBN’s new “national news division,” and his background is in newspapers, not television.

CBN is negotiating with stations across the nation for placement of the earth stations that will enable them to receive CBN programs via satellite. Programs produced at CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia, will be beamed to a satellite on which CBN will lease space from the Continental Satellite Corporation. The network has ordered thirty earth stations and plans to get thirty more so that its programs will be available in the top sixty U.S. television markets.

Besides news programs and its popular “700 Club,” CBN plans also to feed entertainment and public-affairs shows to local outlets. Among the planned offerings are soap operas and comedies.

CBN owns television stations in Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, and Virginia Beach. (It also owns six radio stations, but a spokesman said there are no plans to provide a radio news service.) Some 130 other television stations carry the “700 Club,” and the program is also relayed to more than 4,000 cable-television communities. It is available in many countries in Central and South America also.

Joining the CBN staff this month as head of its news division was Bob G. Slosser, a former assistant national editor of the New York Times who became the editor of the now defunct National Courier. Slosser will begin recruiting a staff immediately, with a network of 200 correspondents in view. Most are expected to be “stringers” who either are freelancers or work for other organizations.

Initial plans call for a daily thirty-minute newscast, a weekly hour-long “magazine type” feature, and a separate religious news program. Robertson, founder and president of CBN, said that the news shows “will cover all the major stories shown on CBS, NBC, and ABC.” What will make the CBN coverage different, according to Slosser, is that “we are a Christian organization and therefore under keener scrutiny. We have to be better than the others. Our emphasis will be on fairness, accuracy, and thoroughness, rather than flamboyance or being ‘first at all costs.’ ”

Robertson hit what he called a “bias centered in the Washington/New York axis” in the existing television news coverage. “We do not intend to follow the lead of two or three national newspapers in deciding what are the key stories,” he declared. “We are particularly interested in hard-hitting investigative reporting, and will not be bound by any ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to cover up the failings or escapades of public figures or gross errors in public policy. We would also like to show some of the good news, the very wonderful and wholesome activities from the heartland of America that deserve to be brought to the attention of our people. It’s a big job. It’s like David taking on Goliath. But I think the time is now, and that the project is economically viable.”

Economics will doubtless be the hardest test. So far, CBN has arranged long-term financing of $12 million to order the earth stations. The programs will be provided free to affiliate stations. Revenue is expected to come from regional and national advertising. How CBN fares in the ratings race with CBS, NBC, and ABC will be a major factor in whether it gets enough advertising dollars to stay in the news business.

The Open Congress: ‘Beyond Evangelism’

With a little help ($350,000) from his family foundation, Texas supermarket executive and Laity Lodge leader Howard E. Butt, Jr., threw a party in Los Angeles last month. More than 800 influential men and women who were “open to the leadership of Jesus Christ” turned out for the five-day North American Congress of the Laity.

That Butt, 50, a Southern Baptist former lay preacher, could assemble a crowd that size was in itself no surprising feat; for some twenty years he has been emphasizing lay renewal groups. But the makeup of the crowd was surprising. The conferees represented a broad cross section of society, and while some of the speakers were “safe” evangelicals, others were of liberal and ecumenical persuasion, or were Roman Catholic, or even had no apparent Christian faith at all.

Among the speakers were Catholic writers Abigail McCarthy and Michael Novak, management consultant Peter Drucker (who said during a news conference after his speech that he’d rather not discuss theology). Lutheran historian Martin Marty, Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger, Catholic psychologist Eugene Kennedy, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Reston, who described himself as “backsliding Scottish Presbyterian.”

There were others, of course, who delighted the hearts of evangelicals in particular, such as exiled Ugandan bishop Festo Kivengere, bludgeoning social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, and black gospel musician Andrae Crouch.

And rubbing shoulders with top evangelical personalities were such mainline church figures as William P. Thompson, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church; Claire Randall, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; and Cynthia Wedel, a president of the World Council of Churches.

Deaths

CRAWFORD WILLIAM BROWN, 82, an Episcopal clergyman and first director of the chaplaincy service of the Veterans Administration; in San Gabriel, California, of pneumonia.

JOHN ANTHONY BROWN, 59, president of United Presbyterian-related Muskingum College in Ohio; in St. Louis, of a heart ailment.

LEONARD FEENEY, 80, a former Jesuit priest who was excommunicated in 1953 for teaching that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church; at Ayer, Massachusetts, after suffering for years from heart ailments and Parkinson’s disease. Even though he is not known to have recanted his position on salvation, his excommunication was removed in 1972.

Still, a few leaders who had been asked to lead “theoventures” (discussion groups) rejected Butt’s invitation on the grounds that the affair, held at a Hyatt Regency Hotel, was too lavish and tilted too far toward the affluent and the prestigious. A few others stayed away because they feared their own conservative constituencies would withhold money if they learned they had given apparent approval to an evangelically sponsored conference that went well beyond the conservative Protestant perspectives.

Butt’s purpose in convening the congress was, he said, to break down “artificial barriers between liberals and conservatives; Protestants and Catholics; secularity and religion; art, science, business, and theology; men and women; nations and races.” “I am trying to be a bridge builder or reconciler,” he explained. “It is maturing for evangelicals to hear other points of view.… In classic Christian orthodoxy we don’t have to be afraid of an open forum and the free exchange of ideas. This doesn’t denote insecurity or deny the faith we profess.”

The idea for the congress was born at the last Butt-sponsored laity conference, held in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1976. Martin Marty, who attended that conference with his wife Else (she heard “born-againism” there for the first time, Marty said), told CHRISTIANITY TODAY in an interview that he and Butt had talked about going beyond “mere evangelism.” “I sensed in him an honest desire to move into a new stage,” remarked Marty. “There wasn’t a trace of evangelical imperialism.” Marty added that the Los Angeles congress, which passed no resolutions and issued no statements, was “a symbol of carrying the evangelical movement to a point beyond which it cannot go back again.”

The church historian and author noted that while the 1960s was the decade of Catholic-Protestant dialogue, “this decade’s exciting ecumenical grouping is the mainliners and evangelicals getting together.”

If that is true, this congress, for which former President and Mrs. Gerald Ford were honorary chairpersons, served as a model. The conferees represented a broad spectrum: 12 per cent corporate chief executive officers, 32 per cent entrepreneurs and senior managers, 25 per cent professionals in medicine, law, and science, 19 per cent a potpourri of educators, government officials, media leaders, entertainers, artists, and sports figures. Only 12 per cent were clergy. Nobody seemed to care, but there were twice as many Presbyterians as Methodists, and these top two affiliations were followed by Baptists, Catholics, and Episcopalians.

Despite the obvious erudition and sophistication of most of the delegates, a minor but widespread criticism voiced during the busy five days was that most of the presentations were overly intellectual. The more down-to-earth, easy-to-follow talks, like those by Kennedy and Kivengere, received standing ovations. And the crowd obviously enjoyed Crouch and his no-bones-about-it Christian testimony.

Music and art displays as well as the talented puppetry, mime, and street theater of the San Diego-based Lamb’s Players added a much-needed dimension.

Will there be another congress like this one?, Butt was asked. His answer was that it was too soon to tell. Clearly, Howard Butt would like to see the evangelicals continue to woo the main-liners. Yet he declared, “I want to be a Christian first and an evangelical second. In every religious community there is a peril of party spirit.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

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